I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all.
It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the industry are towards minimizing costs / maximizing profits. This is fine for some other industries, but it seems to fail for areas where the impact of mismanagement is much more severe than a bankruptcy.
We have to find a way to make those critical industries transparent and honest so that citizens can trust them again.
Regulatory capture is a big problem. One of the more bizarre twists in the Japanese nuclear story is that a program to develop robots that could remotely work inside damaged nuclear generating stations was canceled out of fear that it would send a message that nuclear power isn't safe.
Regulatory capture is THE problem. Contrary to the parent post's claim, the problem is not with our "economic system". It's that, if you're going to regulate something (particularly something as complex as nuclear energy), then you need experts. And the only place to get those experts is from the industry. Generally, those people are naturally going to look at the industry from a certain perspective, one that views the activity of the industry as important, and its status quo as something other than an historical accident.
Until you can find a way to extract human nature from the regulatory process -- and that's even before we start talking about corruption -- you're not going to get anything better.
So sure, the industry tries to push the boundaries, and we should call them out for that. But while doing so, we must also consider how the regulators -- themselves humans -- might do even worse. That side of the equation is too often overlooked.
> It's that, if you're going to regulate something (particularly something as complex as nuclear energy), then you need experts. And the only place to get those experts is from the industry.
This is a very key point.
One of the ways that the Navy's nuclear management agency (NR) has tried to avoid the problem of regulatory capture is that they train their own experts in addition to pulling experienced personnel from the nuclear-powered fleet.
Those who have never been underway but still understand nuclear power and administration are typically thought of as a bunch of pompous no-fun assholes... but that's their job and they do it well. They have little to no ability to be empathic with ship's crew as they've not been underway and dead tired and all that... and so it's that much easier to demand that the right thing is done instead of the easy thing.
It's not enough just to train your own experts though. NR pulls people back from the fleet, as those with operational experience are those who best understand the typical shortcuts that might be employed by the crew, and how to detect that those shortcuts are being practiced.
But you're exactly right, it's impossible to design a safe nuclear power industry without looking at how best to design the regulatory component.
Interesting point of note: the US Navy's nuclear program has far more miles of safe travel than the shuttle program, or any other program ever, despite a maximum speed in the vicinity of 30 mph. That means the number of operating hours is fantastically larger.
This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)?
Or is the claim that regulation made the problem somewhat worse, and this margin (between how bad the problem would've been without regulation and how bad it was with regulation) is the only part that would even be humanly possible to rectify?
Because if I owned the plant and I didn't have any regulators to deal with, I would think it in my interest to behave even worse: to lie more, to hide more, to be even less concerned about doing a thorough job of preventing the public's exposure to regulation.
You should look up "regulatory capture" it means something very different than how you are taking it.
Just so it's not a low-content post, a company can lobby the government to change, weaken or not enforce existing regulations, and often they compound this with bribery of the regulator. Many large companies in the United States go further and lobby to extend or re-word regulations specifically to give themselves a monopoly over the regulated market. All of these actions are forms of regulatory capture.
Other examples of it: the present state of the us patent and copyright system, especially if you include enforceable work-for-hire clauses and the language in various treaties referring to copyrights. Elon Musk's difficulties selling his electric cars online in Texas and other states are due to regulatory capture by car dealerships in that state. In general, most government-backed monopolies or "public-private partnerships" can safely be expected to involve a significant amount of regulatory capture.
Still though you should look it up because both the term and the actual process are really useful at figuring out the hows-and-whys of US government domestic actions.
Regulatory capture is when the people tasked with keeping an industry on its best behavior have too close ties to the industry, through personal connections or financial incentives, and are no longer able to do their jobs.
I would agree that we have a problem with inadequate or corrupt regulators in several industries.
Regulatory capture can take the form of outright corruption, but the more insidious form is cognitive capture. That's where the regulators simply don't have a sufficiently detached perspective from those they are regulating. They internalize the needs and thought patterns of the industry as there own.
A related phenomenon in foreign affairs circles is called "going native".
That's very interesting. It's easy to imagine how, as a regulator, going out to dinner with the regulated (or their representatives) on a regular basis would influence your thinking. It doesn't require a conspiracy theory, so it gives us a great jumping-off point for a rational discussion about how to limit the opportunity for this phenomenon to manifest. Thanks for the new viewpoint!
> This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)?
If it were unregulated by government, then yes. It's a bit misleading to say there would be absolutely nothing regulating the industry if government wasn't.
That was a government sponsored program that was government canceled in the first place. A private company, would not have even bothered with it in the first place, especially if there was no subsidy.
I can think of one thing, and no one will swallow it in our society: The engineers who work on nuclear plants must pledge their lives for its safety, and ritually kill themselves in the event of an incident.
I'm perfectly serious, in that it's within the human experience and it would work. I also suspect our world society can't wrap its head around that kind of medieval pact, and I'm not even sure I want to live in that world.
Still, knowing you have to hang yourself if the plant goes critical is pretty good motivation to do things right and not cut corners.
EDIT: well, this is getting misunderstood. My point here is: would you accept a lesser guarantee of safety? If you really believe that nuclear power can be made safe, these hypothetical engineers aren't at risk.
Let's say I took a pledge to kill myself if a meteor ever knocks the flame off the Statue of Liberty. Would any of you worry about me? No?
Maybe we shouldn't build nuke plants at the moment, then.
Mistakes aren't deterministic, they are largely probabilistic.
While ritual suicide might make the victims of an accident feel better, they are ultimately unproductive - there are many classes of disastrous errors that have nothing to do with negligence.
Not to mention also, even in incidents with a preventable cause, it is exceedingly rare for there to be a singular cause. Chernobyl, for example, was the culmination of a vast number of errors and safety lapses. Should the entire plant workforce kill themselves?
Things like nuclear meltdowns are black swan events, with a multitude of causes and guilt. What you're basically suggesting is that, in the case of such a black swan event, we will kill off a large proportion of the only people who can prevent it from happening again.
While I do think a "vast number of errors and safety lapses" is unlikely to come out of a cult (note the word) of engineering which embraces ritual suicide as the cost of failure...
This is about human psychology, rather than reliability in the engineering sense. I truly believe it would lead to better safety, but not perfect safety.
The idea is that yes, all or most of the engineers involved in a nuclear accident of any significance would kill themselves. Not only would their knowledge be lost, their fellow nuclear engineers would carve their names on a black stone, bury it in the earth beneath their corrupted stain, and never mention them again. Their families would be rewarded only if they showed honor by staying to fight the nuclear corruption, and dying honorably when the disaster is contained.
This won't work perfectly, but it would let society as a whole live with the contradiction inherent in nuclear power: it sustains us, while running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation.
This is also pure thought experiment: what would it take to have a culture of safety as serious as the threat of nuclear disaster? I'm not willing to pay this price, and yet, I'm thoroughly familiar with the mass balance equations governing extractable energy and haven't a clue how to post-carbon without at least some nuclear.
running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation.
But here's the thing: we have already had two "nuclear accidents of any significance": Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Neither of those came even remotely close to "turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation". Nor will Fukushima. Yes, it's very bad for people near the plant, and for fishermen in the surrounding waters. But on a global scale, it's just not that big.
what would it take to have a culture of safety as serious as the threat of nuclear disaster?
Wrong question; the answer to it ask you ask it is that we already have a culture of safety at least that serious, with regard to nuclear power, because we treat nuclear power far more strictly than we treat other sources of power (like coal) that pose greater overall risk to humans. If we're going to effectively ban nuclear reactors because we're worried about radiation, we should also ban coal because we're worried about deaths from mining. And we should ban oil because of the risk of something like the Deepwater Horizon spill.
There isn't a simple solution to any of this; but a good start would be to be open and realistic about all the risks of all power sources.
Coal is much less dangerous for those who live near the power plant.
Oh, I should have added: this claim isn't really true either. The WHO estimates that a million people die each year due to air pollution from coal plants. This is many orders of magnitude higher than the annual average deaths related to nuclear energy.
The difference is, there isn't a worldwide push to ban coal because of this; instead, there's a push to scrub the plant emissions to remove the pollution. So again, nuclear is treated much more strictly than other power sources, relative to its actual risk.
Its like motor vehicle accidents Vs airplane crashes. More people die on car accidents but infrequent airplane accidents get a lot more press and strict government regulation.
>Coal is much less dangerous for those who live near the power plant
I don't believe so. Toxicity and Emissions of a coal-fire power plant does severely affect those in the neighborhood. Studies show that radiation dose is comparable. As and Se are found to have higher concentrations in soil samples.
Yes, but the coal plant won't suffer a catastrophic failure. It has negative effects, sure, but they're diffuse, not acute, like a nuclear meltdown is.
It has negative effects, sure, but they're diffuse, not acute, like a nuclear meltdown is.
So killing or having adverse health effects on far more people is OK, as long as the effects are diffuse? I'm not following the logic here. The number of people affected by Fukushima, even on the worst-case estimates, is less than the number of people affected in a year by the various aspects of coal plants that posters here have mentioned.
You're not following the logic because you're using a global perspective, while I'm using a local perspective, based on self-interest. I'm not arguing for or against nuclear power, except to say that the acute effects of a potential meltdown lead to a lot of NIMBY folks.
I'm using a local perspective, based on self-interest.
And I'm saying that this local perspective (which I understand might not be yours, you might just be trying to articulate the perspective of the NIMBY folks) is flawed, because it doesn't treat equal impacts on self-interest equally. It protests against nuclear plants, while not protesting at all against coal plants that have a greater impact on the same person's self-interest, simply because the impact of the coal plant is "diffuse": it pollutes their lungs over time, all the time, instead of bringing some probability of being in a Fukushima zone, but the total impact on expected years of life (or expected quality of life) for that person is still greater for the coal plant.
I understand that this perspective is common, but that doesn't make it right.
Furthermore, the risks of emphysema and cancer due to coal pollution are underrated. Coal causes much more deaths among people who don't live in coal plants than we like to pretend. (Conversely, nuclear is safer on the balance.)
The amount of radiation that comes out of a coal plant (mainly from Cesium 151) on a yearly basis far exceeds that of a nuclear power plant in its lifetime.
Does that mean you're not concerned about the deaths from coal mining? You're only concerned about the risks that impact you personally? That doesn't seem to be a common attitude: if it were, nobody would have complained about the Deepwater Horizon spill except people who lived on the Gulf coast. (And nobody would complain about nuclear power except those who had to live near a plant.)
>Does that mean you're not concerned about the deaths from coal mining?
No, it doesn't. It's a difference between risks taken willingly by the people who benefit from the outcome, and risks imposed on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit. And it's obvious that it was meant that way. Don't be deliberately obtuse.
I imagine you've heard of the recommendation for pregnant women and small children not to consume too much fish in their diet.
The largest part of that mercury comes from coal-burning power plants. Coal power has contaminated the entire planet to the point where any food from the ocean has to be limited for vulnerable people.
There is no way you can possibly say that coal doesn't impose risks on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit.
Coal is far more dangerous than nuclear by nearly every measure. The only reason it's more generally accepted is because that danger is spread out over a much wider area. Global coal power is analogous to a constant, ongoing Chernobyl, except instead of covering a small chunk of Europe, the same effects are diluted over the entire planet.
We all pay a measurable and fairly significant price for coal power generation in terms of shortened lives and increased chances of various disease. Nuclear power has not contaminated the planet to even remotely the same degree.
I personally think nuclear power can be made relatively safe, and that fears about accidents are exaggerated. I welcome disagreement there, but it's not possible to make a charitable comparison with coal in any way. The disparity in opinions and dangers between nuclear and coal is very real.
risks imposed on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit
Huh? People do have a choice to move if they don't want to live near a power plant. And the plant is making the electricity they use, so they do benefit from it.
(That said, plenty of nuclear plants have been killed because the people who would have lived near the plant protested.)
Probably the majority don't. The poorer you are the less choices you have. If they can move its probably to another undesirable location. I doubt that those who live by power plants are wealthy.
No, the poorer you are the less attractive choices you have. But you still have the ability to weigh your choices and pick the one that poses you the least risk, all things considered.
> This is about human psychology, rather than reliability in the engineering sense. I truly believe it would lead to better safety, but not perfect safety.
The problem is that you have no idea how Process Safety works, or even what it is, judging by your posts. As the parent to this post explained, these major hazard events are probabilistic, not deterministic. That means that they can never be completely eliminated, only guarded against and reduced to the point that the benefit is understood to outweigh the risk. There will always be risk.
You suggest that the engineers responsible for designing the plant should commit suicide if this once in a million year event takes place. What about the businessmen who accepted the risk? Or the government who stipulated what the tolerable risk was? Or the people who moved nearby, aware of the risk? Or the workers on the plant who, knowing what the correct maintenance procedures were to keep the plant safely operational, ignored them because it was 'too hard'? What if the root cause was a vector of risk which was poorly understood by everyone at the time? Or the engineering specification was correct, but the materials vendor skimped on QA? Or were lied to by one of their plants? Or a subcontractor of the plant? Etc etc etc.
What you propose, even as a thought experiment, is futile. Because even if you could reduce the risk to only systematic errors made in engineering design, if there was a perceived need or benefit to design the plant, you could always find a group of engineers desperate enough, naive enough, or vain enough to take on the risk. And therefore society as a whole would not be safer.
As it happens there's a large body of engineering knowledge which goes into making dangerous plants 'safe enough' to outweigh the risks to their workers, owners, and society at large. It's not foolproof, but arguably it does a good job of allowing societies to benefit from the dangerous processes we seem so desperate to use. And don't kid yourself - just because these massive events incur a media feeding frenzy, doesn't mean smaller hazardous occurrences don't affect the lives of thousands of people every year. Should we kill everyone who could in some way be held accountable for another's death or injury?
In short, don't let fear guide you into silly knee-jerk reactions. There are massive problems inherent with dangerous processes, and most of them relate to the very human failures of laziness and greed. We're working to improve the situation constantly, but it's a long road and a constant battle.
Things like nuclear meltdowns are black swan events, with a multitude of causes and guilt.
I'm not advocating ritual suicide, but I think it's worth noting that in the case of Fukushima, there is an easily identifiable single root cause to all the current problems: the fact that the backup diesel generators and the switchgear for them were sited behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami. If they had been on higher ground, none of this would have happened; there would have been a continuous supply of cooling water to the reactor cores and things would have shut down normally. The process that led to that siting of the backup generators should be fairly easily traceable, as compared to the design process for the entire reactor complex.
> "the fact that the backup diesel generators and the switchgear for them were sited behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami"
Sure, but who's responsible for that? I don't mean to say that there must be many technical causes of incidents, but rather that it is almost impossible to find a situation where there is a singular human cause.
The multitude of engineers that saw the plans before they went final? The managers who pushed for the generators to be placed there in the first place? The contractors who built it knowing full well that the design was garbage? How high up does it go, and how many degrees removed from the situation do we require before you're absolved of guilt?
We could do something silly to consolidate the guilt, like, "the last person to stamp the designs gets the blame", but that seems like it would encourage a culture of hot-potatoing instead, especially if the stakes are your own life ;)
To put a more extreme example of it: a bus driver falls asleep at the wheel, jumps a curb, and kills a person. Do we punish the driver for his negligence, or his shift supervisor for threatening him into taking an extra-long shift, or someone even further up who knowingly encouraged a culture of overwork?
it is almost impossible to find a situation where there is a singular human cause.
But if you can focus in on a single technical decision that had such a large impact, you can at least focus attention on how that particular technical decision got made. Yes, many humans will have been involved even in that single technical decision; but it's still a lot more manageable to look into how it got made than to look at how the entire plant got designed.
We could do something silly to consolidate the guilt
I'm not talking about guilt; I said I wasn't advocating ritual suicide. I'm talking about how to prevent it from happening again. To do that, you need to be able to focus on something that can actually be changed. Take your bus driver example:
Do we punish the driver for his negligence, or his shift supervisor for threatening him into taking an extra-long shift, or someone even further up who knowingly encouraged a culture of overwork?
Depends on the facts. Was the driver negligent? Could he have reasonably predicted that he would fall asleep at the wheel? How could he have acted on such a prediction?
Did the supervisor actually threaten him into taking an extra-long shift? If so, how did he get away with it? Aren't there rules about preventing driver fatigue? (Certainly commercial airline crews have strict rules about how long they can fly before they have to rest.) If not, why not?
Is there a systemic culture of overwork, encouraged from higher up? Do bus drivers in this company routinely drive longer hours than the industry average? Than the average in other similar occupations?
The point is that if you can focus in on specific causal chains, you can direct efforts at changing them. In the case of Fukushima, if you can focus in on how the technical decision to site the backup generators that way got made, you can direct efforts at improving that process. Did the engineers just not realize that siting the backup generators that way was a bad idea? Was the question never even asked? Or did the engineers realize it, but management overruled them? Or did the original design have them sited differently, but time pressure during construction persuaded someone (not the engineers or managers who did the original design) to change the location in order to meet some deadline?
All this, btw, reinforces your point that ritual suicide doesn't help anything.
> Could he have reasonably predicted that he would fall asleep at the wheel?
Such things sometimes can't be predicted. If you fall asleep because of exhaustion, you don't necessarily see it coming (it happened to me several years back, one minute I was fine and the next I blacked out). You cannot criminally persecute a person for falling asleep. Only if he did something against the law, like also being under the influence of alcohol.
> Did the supervisor actually threaten him into taking an extra-long shift?
You know very well that supervisors rarely have to threaten their subordinates in low-end jobs. I have a personal acquaintance who's a truck driver. And he was explaining to me how when the new management came in, they first did some lay-offs based on silly reasons and after that nobody dared arguing.
Also do some reading on Japanese culture. Subordinates rarely question their bosses (or change jobs for that matter). It happens in many cultures. If you're from the US, then what's natural to you may not apply in other countries or cultures.
I'm not saying that blame cannot be assigned (it can clearly be, especially in the case of broken engineering designs), but seeing people here suggesting "ritual suicide"? OMG.
As I said, I'm not talking about guilt, or blame (and I'm certainly not advocating for ritual suicide); I'm talking about what could be done to change the causal factors that lead to harmful events. All of your comments are basically pointing out particular facts that are relevant to assessing those causal factors.
> behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami.
They made a 20 ft sea-wall. I guess nobody thought it would be overrun. I suspect now any future seawalls will be made with a good factory of safety.
But why would you even take that risk? Not to mention that tsunamis can easily reach 100 feet in wave height; I'm not sure you could build a seawall that could keep one out.
It would be easier to put the generators in bunkers and harden them.
Besides, it was pretty clear to me reading the sequence of events at Fukushima that there was entirely too little thought given to backup decoupling - there was too much of a zipper effect of one failure leading to another.
I'm not a lay person on this - I worked for 3 years on airliner designs, and much of that is finding ways to deal with failure cases. The nuke industry could learn a lot by consulting with airframe engineers.
It would be easier to put the generators in bunkers and harden them.
Yes, that would work, as long as you also protected the switchgear and the power cabling leading to the pumps that serve the reactor.
The nuke industry could learn a lot by consulting with airframe engineers.
I think the nuke industry in general does pay attention to these things; I was actually somewhat surprised to find that the designers of Fukushima had missed such an obvious failure mode.
From what I read about the disaster, there were a long series of design issues that could not withstand failures. As I recall,
1. hydrogen being vented into an enclosed area
2. no backup method for determining coolant levels
3. backup generators were not protected
4. no backup method for adding coolant (I would have had a gravity fed backup system)
5. critical systems were located too close to the reactor - I would have moved them further away so they could be repaired without the workers being irradiated
1. You cannot prevent that if the reactors cannot be cooled down. Ultimately very high temperatures will break vapor into hydrogen and will cause hydrogen to accumulate on the shell.
3. Backup generators were located in different areas. The only mistake is that they were ALL at ground level. That's unfortunate that they were all wiped out at the same time but one of the largest Tsunami ever, some stuff that almost never happens. They'll learn from that.
> None of these are expensive to do.
Yeah, when you are building the plant, it's not expensive to do. When you have to modify an existing design, it's way more expensive and you'll have to make a good case for why you need it.
Bear in mind that these reactors were built in the 1970s. Modern designs are a lot better, and some shut down by themselves upon loss of power, with no need for active measures at all. Even some reactors built in the 1980s got through the events at Fukushima just fine.
I worked on airframe design in the 1970s. The ethos of design to withstand failure was well-entrenched then, and goes back a long way in the airframe industry.
The key idea is nobody has managed to design parts that won't fail. But they have figured out how to design highly reliable systems out of parts that fail.
Sure. The American nuclear industry kinda caught up with that after Three Mile Island, when they figured out that one nuclear accident put them all at risk. They developed an extreme culture of safety after that.
Current designs use lots of redundant safety systems. New designs depend more on simple physics...eg., fuel that expands enough when it heats to damp down the reaction, or large quantities of coolant with very high thermal capacity and conductivity. At Argonne's IFR project, they shut down coolant circulation and electric power, and the reactor quietly shut down with no damage.
The problem was not in shutting down the chain reaction - that worked just fine. The problem was in dealing with fuel rods that were still, due to decay processes that nothing in the universe can stop, producing massive amounts of heat that, without active cooling, would melt them and re-start the chain reaction.
Sure, but if the reactor can go a week without cooling and not sustain damage, you've got a lot more leeway. Some of the GenIII+ designs we have now can do that.
The ultimate solution is probably the molten salt reactor. With liquid fuel you continually remove fission products, and with most of those gone you don't have decay heat issues anymore.
The engineers don't necessarily have enough power for that to work. And the current engineers on site aren't necessarily those at fault for a disaster that was caused by incorrect design or construction 30 years ago.
What I would like to see is mandatory escrow of a large percentage of profits from highly-profitable, possibly-disaster-prone industries. If you go disaster-free for 20 years you get your escrowed money with interest. If not, you lose (an appropriate amount of) it.
If only there was a culture that had a centuries-old tradition of committing painful ritual suicide to atone for failures... I would totally trust those guys to safely run a nuclear plant...
The idea is really old. In the Code of Hammurabi, a builder whose building collapses and kills someone is killed. If the building kills a son, the son of the builder is killed.
Simply having it around as a cultural trope ain't gonna do it. I'm talking about a voluntary pledge that assumes the force of law.
Turn it around: if an engineer thinks he can build a perfectly safe nuclear plant, why shouldn't he pledge his life? Similarly, if an engineer thinks she can't build a perfectly safe nuclear plant, that there is a significant risk she'll have to kill herself and leave her children motherless, would she agree to build it?
You have to be careful, because if you make the punishment too harsh, you'll scare away a lot of competent people, but attract a lot of useless morons who think everything they do is golden.
I guess that's the joke but it isn't mine. I don't think understanding the joke makes me a bigot.
Fact is, seppuku is a part of relatively recent Japanese culture whereas it's not a part of European culture. In Europe suicide has been socially unacceptable since the fall of the Roman Empire.
When I was in school to be an Architect, I was told that if I designed something, and I put my signature on blueprints and the structure I designed was built and failed in any sense, it is me, and me alone who is responsible.
So in a sense, this idea (while not nearly as extreme as yours) actually exists today. Architects and Engineers regularly take risks when they attempt to create something new. When it doesn't work, they are usually held accountable:
it's a ridiculous suggestion because
1) the workers at nuclear plants already risk their lives to help out when it's out of control
2) nuclear is so expensive to clean up that they run for decades after the initial design, presumably many of the initial designers are dead, and every incremental change should involve a suicide pact?
Remuneration for such an undertaking would have to go up by a large multiple to make such work attractive.
>Remuneration for such an undertaking would have to go up by a large multiple to make such work attractive.
This is the point. The cost of operating the plant would have to take into account what are currently deemed externalities. If that turned out to make the plant too expensive to run, that's the market.
1. Why do you think this was an engineering failure and not a business/implementation failure? For instance, in that famous pedestrian bridge collapse (a pedestrian walkway in a hotel in I think Kansas City collapsed shortly after opening, killing and injuring an absurd number of people), the bridge was designed correctly, but a deviation from the design in construction led to a fatal flaw.
2. What do you consider "perfect"? A lot of things aren't engineered to be perfect, because that's expensive. Instead, a lot of questions -- like with sea walls -- resolve around things like "ten year storms", "hundred year winds", "thousand year earthquakes". It's very possible that the flaw in this design was considered, but it was concluded that it would take a once-every-thousand-years disaster to breach the sea wall and cause a problem. Everyone involved may have agreed that a 1% chance of failure of the lifetime of the plant was acceptable.
Everything is a cost-benefit analysis. At some point, risks are declared "small enough" and everyone agrees to move forward. In this case, a regulatory agency in Japan -- representing the interests of the government and people -- could very easily have signed off on the risk posed by the positioning of the generators.
And more importantly, just because a small risk ends up being realized doesn't mean we were wrong to take it in the first place. Negligence can cause accidents, and negligence can exacerbate accidents, but also sometimes shit happens. Wasting time, money, and people trying to shrink a one-in-a-million risk just because it happened once is stupid, and we do it all the time.
Third, an obligatory "do you even know how bad coal is?" A hundred thousand miners in the US died mining coal in the last century. 6000 died in China in 2004. "Oh no," you say, "nuclear is extra bad because it poisons places for hundreds or thousands of years!" Underground coal fires: a seam of coal exposed through mining can catch fire and burn underground forever. We have no way to put them out. The most famous of these is in Pennsylvania, where a town had to be abandoned because the coal mine underneath it was burning and releasing noxious gasses up to the surface, along with the occasional flaming sinkhole. The fire is expected to keep burning for hundreds of years. There are dozens or hundreds of fires like in the US, and dozens or hundreds more in China.
I wouldn't want to go swimming in that water released from Fukushima, and by all accounts radiation poisoning is a terrible way to day. But so is being crushed to death in a mine collapse, or slowly starving to death underground in the dark, or dying of the various cancers and ailments related to the carcinogens coal plants routinely belch out. Everything we do has risks, from driving to taking a shower to building power plants.
You are presenting a false dichotomy: the choice is not between a world with nuclear disasters and a world with no disasters. It is a choice between nuclear disasters and non-nuclear disasters. We should seek to minimize the chance of nuclear disasters, yes, but we shouldn't treat them as "special" just because they're "scary". We should weigh the risk of a nuclear plant against the risk of non-nuclear plants, fairly, and make the decision that saves the most lives.
It was not as you describe; the original design was absolutely not correct. The original design was additionally so difficult to implement in reality that one of the manufacturers of the structural parts proposed a design change - one that made the flaws of the original twice as bad - that architects approved without any actual review.
I've been there several times, since it's a popular spot for conferences - looking up at the doors to nowhere in the lobby atrium is haunting.
Yeah, re-reading the article the designer doesn't sound blameless.
I'm probably willing to let my claim stand without anecdote (deviations from design occur outside the engineer's control), but honestly it's the weaker point, so let it drop. The more important one is that engineers design within a set of constraints, and if these parameters are exceeded, it is not the fault of the engineer.
The roof of my house has a certain maximum load it is designed to carry. This load is mostly based on expected snowfall. Conceivably, in a year with exceptional snow fall the maximum load could be exceeded and the roof could collapse, killing my family and myself. However, I -- both through my representative government which makes the rules on minimum maximums and also through my decision to live in such a home -- have decided the risk is acceptable.
If the architect has not misrepresented the maximum load of my roof, why should he be held responsible if it collapses in unexpectedly extreme weather and kills me? If he should not be punished, why is nuclear special?
Terrible idea, but there are examples of it in modern society.
Example: Technician with respirator samples gas levels in giant "empty" natural gas tank, gives OK to welder and steps out of the tank. Welder grabs technician by the arm, escorts him back into the tank and invites him to hang out for a few minutes while he fires up his torch. Technician waves his probe around a few extra times, double checks the display, and crosses his fingers.
I'm sure there's plenty of this sort of thing going on in industry today. Still, probably better not to formalize it.
If you desire to punish the engineers for making mistakes, what will happen is you'll develop a culture of denial and coverup of any problems.
In the various projects I've worked on, I've seen that happen first hand. What works better for the quality of the product is to have a collaborative, open process about finding bugs, fixing them, and rewarding people for having a quality result.
Nuclear power plants are too big to be built and run by one person. While I might be willing to make the pledge for my own work why should I die because the knucklehead in the next cube makes a mistake, or an operator does something stupid, or a plane crashes into the reactor, or terrorist blow up the plant? There are just too many what ifs that are not within any single person's control.
It doesn't matter, everyone would have a strong incentive to not screw up and to prevent everyone else from also not screwing up.
So what if it's not your fault? I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea, but it might increase safety just a little. A tiny probability that a lot of people won't die is a net benefit.
And if an incident did happen, a few extra innocent people dying is barely anything to worry about. Especially if it helps at preventing it from happening at all.
I don't think it will ever happen, but I think it's a good idea.
You touched on very important idea applicable not only to nuclear industry: it's good when workers at all levels have personal stake in success of the enterprise the work for- stake as in part of profit but part of responsibility as well.
Unfortunately our current culture/economic system introduces disconnect in that respect. It's bad enough in non-critical endeavors and very dangerous in industries like nuclear or say medical research.
My observation is that the biggest obstacle to things going into desired direction of aligned incentives is hierarchical management system. You can't expect workers (engineers in nuclear example) to take all responsibility or even feel responsibility when they rarely have a say in budgeting, safety policy or overall strategy of corporation they work for.
If the system was more democratic so to speak then I can see it happening but currently most endeavors are interested in "minimal pay, no say" policy when it comes to hiring.
Did you ever work on a project where you said to your boss, "We need to do X or this won't work," and your boss said, "X is too [expensive | time consuming | difficult], we won't do that."
Or a project where your boss hired a bunch of incompetents at the last minute because the project was running late, and the new hires made endless mistakes that you then had to fix?
Do you want to seppuku because your nuclear plant blew up because your boss was an idiot and wouldn't listen to the engineers?
And don't suggest that the engineers become whistleblowers. We all know how that turns out.
Engineers usually aren't the ones to make funding and budgeting resource decisions. Engineers killing themselves when a plant fails does little if the failure is because they couldn't get budget approved for replacement parts, or if the decision is to continue operating the plant when the tech is beyond its original operating life, or deciding to fund the seawall height at a safety factor of 50% above a 50 year tsunami records, or 300% over 2000 year tsunami records...
Aren't engineers and other employees already committed just by the fact that they are living near the plant with their families?
What about getting that level of commitment from the owners? And if that's not practical, why not remove the profit incentive?
Maybe activities with as massive negative externalities as running nuclear plants should be run as non-profit organizations. Possibly as research institutions, with a strong anchoring in the surrounding local community.
Mouhaha. Ridiculous comment (worth killing yourself for, following your silly logic). Stuff happens. Science is built on the mistakes of the past. If you take this approach we will end up never building anything new and stay stuck in technology.
So, we shouldnt build driverless cars unless some engineer is ready to kill himself over it? Seriously, stop the drugs.
I think it will be more effective if you put the politicians in power or the owners to live next to them, i can assure you there will be no lack of money for building and maintenance of the nuclear plants.
Owners? Oh no. If I'm taking a pledge to kill myself over a pile of thorium, the profit from that energy belongs to me and mine. We are heroes of society. There are no owners.
Our world is not even vaguely ready for any of this.
Its both cases of failing government oversight of these industries. Fukushima got worse and worse, because the company was basically doing and saying whatever they wanted (and seemingly still is) with the government just repeating it.
Same goes for GMO. Its a good but potentially very dangerous technology. We should not simply allow it because a few billion USD in turnover and GDP growth are promised.
No, we should allow it because GMO represents the potential for increases in agricultural efficiency and total output that mean the difference between millions starving to death or not.
I'm not anti-GMO, but your argument is incredibly weak and completely ignores biodiversity and vendor lock in concerns (i.e Monsanto seeds requiring to be re-sown, thus repurchased after every harvest) that seem to be the main angle from most anti-GMO people I know.
The problem is everyone is thinking about the short-term.
"We" in this case is the US (perhaps combined with the Ukraine, Australia & a few other large grain providers).
But that means that much of the worlds population has to rely on food supplies grown elsewhere.
Increasing drought resistance in grain crops could allow African countries to feed themselves, which could decrease political tensions over water supplies.
> I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all.
It's not just the industry or governments, it's also the shamelessly, breathlessly partisan pros and antis who seem to dominate the broader debate on nuclear.
> It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the industry are towards minimizing costs / maximizing profits. This is fine for some other industries, but it seems to fail for areas where the impact of mismanagement is much more severe than a bankruptcy.
There are definitely serious incentive problems. However, making everyone a public employee and so notionally an agent of the public interest doesn't necessarily make such problems go away, viz. Chernobyl.
"It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the industry are towards minimizing costs / maximizing profits."
That sounds more like an unfortunate law of nature rather than our "current economic system". Even under communism or in hunter/gatherer groups there is pressure to do more with less; it's just not called "profit".
The important thing to do is avoid hiding long-term large risks with short-term safety. Our modern economic systems actually make that easier; although technology makes the long-term large risks larger.
Both of these things are tests of our ability to be conscientious, honest, and to take the power we have seriously and act accordingly. They're tests of maturity and responsibility -- at a civilization level.
So far on the nuclear front we've failed that test. Fukushima had its backup generators in the basement -- in a tsunami zone. There is no global nuclear emergency response team. There is no long-term waste solution in many countries including the USA. Managers of plants routinely slack off on safety, reporting, etc.
We are quite simply too irresponsible and immature for such toys... yet. Humanity has a little bit of growing up to do.
I don't think GMOs are an exact comparison, as I think the risk is much smaller there (at least with most GMO technologies). But it's the same class of thing-- a technology that demands maturity and responsibility. I'd extend that to biotech in general.
The gov can kill you equally well with nuclear power as with bad food/water supervision, wrong medical policy (like inoculation strategy), chemical plants, mining operations, waste management, insufficient or corrupted law enforcement, finally by causing some war or economic collapse.
I agree, I don't think a traditional government-controlled company is the answer.
It's probably a mix of public and private entities, with a very strong and independent control authority that doesn't fear shutting things down if they find some wrongdoings (even if this means losing a lot of money in the short-term).
Because the worst nuclear accidents have done less damage than coal plants do every year as part of their normal expected operation. If we were rational we'd replace those coal plants as fast as we could, even if it took nuclear to do it.
Because the accidents have all been with very old designs. Even at Fukushima, in the face of a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, reactors built in the 80's instead of the 70's got through it all just fine.
Because climate change is turning into such a desperate problem that we can't afford to leave any solutions on the table. And nuclear works quite nicely with solar power...nuclear all the time, solar for extra peak load during the day.
Nuclear is not just the side effect of a weapons program. It's an amazing energy source. With the most advanced reactors, all the energy you need for your entire life can come from a lump of fuel smaller than a golfball.
It's very sad that our first use of this technology was to kill people. Perhaps if we hadn't figured it out in the middle of WWII, things would have been different, and climate change would be a hypothetical instead of an imminent nightmare.
Is this really the best humanity has got -- The side effect of a decades-old weapons program?
You are asking the question this way hoping someone has a better answer - they don't. Nuclear is our best option for making clean and reliable power that will get us to that next best option. Some of the new designs out there are quite amazing feats of engineering.
I too can search google and come up with results that say what I want. Care to go into detail about these proven technologies that can power the world and replace our dependence on oil?
Why is it appropriate to compare the worst case for various methods of power generation? I think it's more appropriate to weigh the potential failure cases of each by the probability of them occurring, and I suspect if we did that, nuclear wouldn't be the most harmful method of power generation.
Risk is cost we can't measure because it would require the ability to predict what we cannot. Rents are profits that aren't really profits.
The thing to do is be open, transparent and honest about risk and rents. But at our core, we're all liars when the stakes get high. The math is also error prone.
Remember the political climate those old GE nuke plants were built under - "too cheap to meter" and run by people like Leslie Groves who had infought enough to be at the top of the heap. there was this strange, willful naievete.
"Making those industries transparent and honest" seems impossible.
I'm not convinced that nuclear power is safe, regulators or no. Accidents, mistakes, unforeseen problems, sabotage all will happen, and when it does, it makes an area of land potentially uninhabitable for many years. A system where the failure mode is long-term uninhabitability is not what I call safe.
"I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all."
If you look around you'll find a lot more examples than these two, and you'll trace the root cause as illegitimate use of government force, i.e. use or threat of violence for what is simply peaceful activity.
If someone threatens you with violence, "for your own good", you tend not to trust. But for some reason, when government does this very same thing, most people still trust it. It's like how children still trust parents even though the parents might restrain or even spank them (and this makes good evolutionary sense), but the difference is that the government is not your parent, it does not actually have a concern for you as an individual, it doesn't love you. It is a collection of strangers with their own agendas.
Somehow, government has figured out how to not only co-opt this evolutionary circuitry that was meant for trusting parents at a time when the child really doesn't know what's good for him, and what's more, extend this infantile frame of mind beyond childhood.
All of this recent NSA stuff is just getting toward the final consequences of allowing yourself to adopt such a childish frame of mind. The government has no more right to take a threatening or coercive action against innocent people than any stranger does.
When those in power (in the U.S.) take as a prior that gov't can't/won't work, then they're given an excuse to not really act in the public's interest in good faith, or to try hard to design a regulatory framework that could actually function. Belief in government dysfunction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (that conveniently most benefits those who are already most powerful, those individuals whose power can only be checked by government).
The solution to "regulatory capture" is sometimes less regulation, but at other times transparency and better regulation. This is the real world, and there aren't any silver bullets.
What does this have to do with the government not exerting sufficient regulatory force against bad actors in the nuclear industry? After all, people who don't like being regulated frequently trot out your very complaint as an excuse for why they should not be subject to more regulation. I think you're confused.
This is a 1984 argument from the Cato institute that an act limiting liability to nuclear power facilities should not be renewed.
I think wissler is implying that this shows that the government does "not exert[ing] sufficient regulatory force against bad actors in the nuclear industry"
I think many non-libertarians would agree with that analysis, but would add that the existence of bad regulation does not invalidate the idea that regulation is appropriate.
To be clear: most non-libertarians are less inclined to agree with the idea that this use of government force is illegitimate.
Whether most agree or disagree is irrelevant. It is immoral to attack someone who has not attacked or threatened you. It is likewise immoral to advocate attacking innocents. Take that how you will.
Nuclear power is a special case since it arguably represents a threat, even libertarians would argue that it should be "regulated", in the sense of being required to prove that it's safe. Part of proving safety is by being able to obtain private insurance from a reputable insurer, which is precisely contrary to the non-libertarian solution of just having the government say "just trust us, the nuclear power is fine, and besides, it helps us build nuclear weapons."
It is immoral to attack someone who has not attacked or threatened you. It is likewise immoral to advocate attacking innocents. Take that how you will.
I reject the implication that government regulation is an attack of any kind. I do not agree that the fact a government can enforce its power is an attack, nor do I believe it is immoral.
I do not agree that government regulation is immoral.
As a specific example, I believe in the right of government to tax and their ability to enforce that.
I do not agree that private insurance is a solution for things like nuclear power, even in a "perfect world" theoretical sense. A nuclear disaster is a "black swan" event, and many people/companies would be quite happy to ignore the possibility of disaster and take the insurance premiums while things are going well.
If a company can make 50 years of "free" profits from insuring a nuclear plant, and then go bankrupt in the 50th year when they can't pay out the coverage then all that means is that investors have to make sure to safeguard their dividends/profits over the 49 preceding years.
I explicitly stated that a libertarian case could be made for regulating nuclear power, on the grounds that it constitutes a threat. Is there a reason you're choosing to ignore that fact?
"I reject the implication that government regulation is an attack of any kind."
It critically depends on the meaning of "regulation". If by "regulation" we mean "prove to us that your nuclear power is safe", then as I said, there can be a moral case for that, given the threat of meltdown. But if you mean "don't smoke that plant that's been growing on Earth for millions of years, and we'll send in a SWAT team if you disobey", then that kind of regulation is a crime against humanity.
So, you need to be clear here. Bandying about the term "regulation" is just not good enough.
I explicitly stated that a libertarian case could be made for regulating nuclear power, on the grounds that it constitutes a threat. Is there a reason you're choosing to ignore that fact?
I'm not ignoring it - I thought you meant that the requirement for private insurance would be a major part of it. I replied how that wouldn't work.
What exactly do you mean by "regulation" beyond the (non-workable) private insurance idea?
To be clear - my idea of regulation in this case is an independent government body with the sole purpose of being responsible for safety oversight. This means approval for blueprints, locations and operational procedures etc, as well as continuous operational monitoring, the ability to shut down the plant and to impose penalties of fines and jail time (subject to oversight of the court system course).
if you mean "don't smoke that plant that's been growing on Earth for millions of years, and we'll send in a SWAT team if you disobey", then that kind of regulation is a crime against humanity.
Yes, I believe that government has a right to make laws regarding the use of drugs. No, I don't think they should send in a SWAT team if someone smokes a joint (And no, that isn't a contradiction as the many places that do have drug laws but don't use SWAT teams to enforce them shows). I do not have strong opinions for or against cannabis prohibition. I don't want to derail this into a drug law discussion though.
Yes, I believe that government has a right to make laws regarding the use of drugs.
This is the critical issue.
By what right? Where does an institution of mere men get the prerogative to interfere with other men deciding to consume certain types/arrangements of matter?
By the right of a society to make rules that govern those within it.
I realize from previous experience that it's likely you think this is an illegitimate right. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that this is how societies have functioned throughout human history.
Edit: I believe this is a distraction from the nuclear regulation debate - which I note you have chosen to ignore.
I agree that, yes, there is a fair debate to be had about the legitimacy of laws deciding what someone can do to their own body. However, there is a fair amount of historical evidence that indicates it has been a long accepted right (eg, laws against drunkenness). As I said previously I don't have a strong opinion either way as to if these should apply to private use of cannabis.
It's funny how you think that getting to the heart of the matter is "distraction."
But from your answer I can see why you don't want to have this discussion, it's just sheer nonsense. The word "right" doesn't refer to "we've always raped and pillaged after we won a war, so that gives us a right to keep on doing it."
I don't think you are philosophically equipped to use the word "right" here. For you, "right" simply means "might." So you might as well just say, "Yeah? Whaddya goin to do about it?" Don't pretend to be having a discussion about "right".
The topic of the discussion is a nuclear accident. Nevertheless I'm still discussing libertarianism with you.
The word "right" doesn't refer to "we've always raped and pillaged after we won a war, so that gives us a right to keep on doing it."
I agree with that 100%. I don't think anything I have said could be taken to mean that I support rape & pillage.
For you, "right" simply means "might."
No it doesn't, and just saying that is what I think doesn't make it so.
I understand the libertarian view: that governmental power is illegitimate because it is derived from force.
I also completely reject that view: I believe that governmental power is derived from a civil society and that power is society's way of imposing an agreed set of behaviour in the face of bad actors. I see nothing immoral or wrong in this - indeed, it is the very principle of democracy.
A couple of additional points:
1) Trying to say I don't want to have this discussion is demonstrably wrong (ie, this reply, and all the other ones). Saying something is sheer nonsense is unhelpful - I'm not clear if you think the discussion is nonsense or if it is merely an expression of frustration?
2) I don't care either way about drugs. Clearly that is something you feel passionate about, but I'm not the person to discuss it with. Sorry.
3) I find it very interesting that you have avoided the problems with your theory about nuclear regulation and insurance. I find that is often the case with libertarians - their ideas sound nice on a surface level but when you dig a little bit there is nothing there. I'm unclear if this is because the ones I discuss it with don't understand their own philosophy, or they are unable to explain it, or because there really is nothing there.
So far you haven't tried to explain it. Unfortunately that leaves me none-the-wiser.
I understand the libertarian view: that governmental power is illegitimate because it is derived from force.
This is incorrect. Certainly some strains of libertarianism wrongly think that, but certainly not all. The word "libertarian" is a very loose idea, not some specific ideology. And besides, you were the one who claimed I was "libertarian", I never made the claim myself. What I'd say is that I'm pro-individual consent. "Classical liberal" is a fine word.
I also completely reject that view: I believe that governmental power is derived from a civil society and that power is society's way of imposing an agreed set of behaviour in the face of bad actors. I see nothing immoral or wrong in this - indeed, it is the very principle of democracy.
The question you're ignoring is: what are the proper limits of government power? You claim I'm ignoring questions, but this is the only question of importance. I only bring up the drugs example to highlight an obvious abuse. Nuclear power is a more complex issue. When you're confused about arithmetic, we don't discuss calculus. Likewise, when you're confused about rights, we don't discuss nuclear power. We stick with simpler issues.
I think this childishness is the essential requirement of centralized power. Our current economic system rises from our (personal) taste for the conveniences of centralized power. For it we are willing to relinquish personal responsibility and individuality.
Many early people groups (nomads, pueblos, even manors and unfederated fifedoms), had optimized for small communities. Presumably they were not aware of the efficiency of centralized power, or capable of the centralization we can accomplish today. Some apparently were aware, and chose the benefits of small communities.
I believe we are now at a crossroads. We choose small communities and relinquish the convenience of centralized power, or we submit to the requirements of centralized power (lack of privacy, lack of individuality, etc).
Has GMO ever been confirmed to have harmed anybody? Confusion between real and imagined threats could be part of the problem. Nuclear accidents will kill you, as in -- dead.
GMO is like hammering. It can be used for good or evil.
The informed opposition to GMO covers two types of modifications.
#1 Making plants more resistant to herbicides, so that more herbicides can be used.
#2 Giving plants new abilities to create their own insecticides.
Both are terrible ideas. Mostly because they're pumping the biological arms race as well as the side effects.
GMO for increased yield, durability, flavor, whatever are totally okay (depending on ones esthetics). We've been doing that for millennia thru breeding, artificial selection, and hybridization.
"Both are terrible ideas. Mostly because they're pumping the biological arms race as well as the side effects."
The notion that the genes spliced into crops could spark an evolutionary feedback loop that spirals out of control -- the evidence doesn't indicate any great cause for alarm, afaik. And the toxic side effects are unlikely to be of greater concern than from chemicals made in labs. I think the amount of public alarm about GMO is way out of proportion to the actual risk. This technology holds the promise of making agriculture less damaging and more efficient. I think the fixation on this issue is related to traits that make it a good a viral meme, and have nothing to do with rational risk-assessment.
>Has GMO ever been confirmed to have harmed anybody?
There are sereval of studies that show that those examined can be harmful -- but it's a whole field, one cannot speak for all of them as harmful, can only examine them one by one. The general practice is harmful to me, because profit motives and patents are involved.
I don't think just because they found out how to genetically modify plants that they also can understand the long term effects of their creations (to other plants, insects, animal life, the consumer, etc). Nor do I believe that they have the scientific rigor and patience to study those with the timeframes needed. It's more: "fuck it, let's sell these things".
Plus it's a huge industry, with trillions to be made, that dwarfs smoke -- not many research labs get the funds to examine it critically. It's like pre-eighties, when tons of smoke studies were sponsored by tobacco companies, and found "little or no evidence" of it causing cancer.
They have been markedly less successful at that than other industrial accidents.
edit: Wikipedia suggests a total of about 9250 accidental deaths worldwide over the past 56 years related to nuclear research, power, weapons and therapy, of which some 126 died of radiation while the rest died from explosions and cancer (estimates vary; except for the 9000 deaths attributed to Chernobyl, the numbers likely discount some terminal cancers).
I'm so fucking sick of this. This level of ass-clownery makes Japan look so bad, and so diminishes its national prestige in the world, that it's almost like when Bush the junior was president of the USA.
Yes, TEPCO is a private company. But it reflects on Japan the same way it would if the US government just left BP and Halliburton to decide entirely for themselves how to clean up the New Horizon oil rig disaster, with no meaningful oversight nor repercussions.
Except that the Fukushima disaster is about 100 times worse than the New Horizon spill.
TEPCO should have been nationalized, or at least put into a decade of receivership, within a few days of the fail, when it became clear that they were completely unequipped to deal with a disaster of this magnitude and their president checked himself into a hospital for stress/mental issues.
Yeah, well, it's easy to make bets on events that will still be playing out hundreds of years after we are all dead, isn't it.
Radioactive contamination of the food supply, the oceans, and tens of thousands of people exiled from their hometown for the rest of their lives.
17 injured and 11 dead rig workers is easily comprehended and instant. Doesn't really mean that disaster was worse, though. Just easier to contemplate.
Yeah, well there are still people living very close to Chernobyl and who don't die from instant cancer every year. We have no real knowledge of how medium levels of radiation cause safety/health issue. We know very high levels of radiations kill, and low levels or radiation don't kill much, but we have very unreliable data in between, and we know for sure it's not a linear effect.
Sure, once it's perfectly stirred every glass of water from the ocean contains radiating Fukushima atoms. You just have to make sure none of your cells is currently on the edge to switch to cancer mode.
I'm not saying that it's not a problem, but we have been conducting underwater nuclear tests, and dumped an incredible amount of nuclear waste in the ocean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_w...). And we're still alive. Even if we proceed to dump all of Fukushima in the ocean and just forget about it, it will still be extremely diluted and less than what is already there.
Look especially at the the varying background radiation levels -- and minimum level of radiation that has been proven to increase cancer risk. (And if you're trolling, go to the gym instead.)
Did all that years ago, didn't come to the conclusion radiation and cancer are unrelated. But, if you think a higher mutation rate is a good thing go ahead, I think Tepco is currently looking for that kind of worker.
Because they occurred together, people conflate the natural disasters of the earthquake and tsunami with the nuclear one.
But there were no deaths caused by radiation exposure, and this year the WHO claimed that the health risks to evacuees attributable to radiation are below detectable levels.
A shallow look onto the Deepwater Horizon spill makes it pretty clear that it had far more serious environmental and health effects.
You've not been paying much attention to the Japanese nuclear industry. This is the industry that allowed junior staff to mix nuclear materials together unsupervised, causing a chain reaction:
Lets try to stay on topic here. We should be doing everything we can to help Japan, not poking fun of them or trying to start some kind of competition of incompetence.
Yes, it's not about public/private. At a certain "screw-up" level, it doesn't matter anymore.
This is a Japanese problem, but it's close to becoming a worldwide problem
The containment has failed, as the leaks show, now what's the solution for that? Can we just pour tons and tons of sand on top so it melts and becomes a glass cocoon? (I don't know)
it is certainly not just a Japanese problem. Japanese uranium mines didn't fuel the reactors, and the radiological contamination does not recognise national borders. The mismanagement of this disaster is not solely the responsibility of the Japanese government, but has been enabled by the hopeful silence of other nations. Why didn't all our governments stand up and denounce the misinformation around declaration of a 20msv 'acceptable' public dose limit, up from 1msv? Hoping to continue on with business as usual, international authorities stayed silent while their Japanese counterparts misled their people about what was 'safe'.
By what standard do you see Fukushima as being worse? Number of casualties? Number of people who had their livelihood directly affected? The effect on the biosphere?
Let's just say that hundreds of people will work in extreme conditions (high radiation, damaged nuclear material, damaged buildings) for the next 20 years to keep this thing from collapsing/... before the next heavy earth quake hits.
... and the region around the plant has been quite severely affected: long term evacuation of inhabitants in some areas, kids can't play outside in others (and must take constant "precautions"), large scale decontamination needed (removal of top-soil, etc), fishermen not allowed to fish (it depends on the species and their feeding habits etc, some have shown no contamination, others are way, way, over the limits), many problems caused by loss of confidence (obvious huge drop in tourism, a very hard time selling farm produce, etc).
So sure, the number of people that started glowing green and exploded is small (:-), but the financial and social repercussions of the Fukushima incident are not small at all. "Number of people that died" isn't the only statistic to look at when evaluating such things...
1. Number of people who died, or will die, weighted by how they die -- painful slow death by internal organ cancers being pretty far up there on my chart.
2. Number of people who have traumatic long term health episodes, like cancer, that degrade their quality of life. Even if it isn't until much later.
3. Number of people who have to leave long-established hometown territory and give up their homes, to live in crappy housing (way better than an American FEMA trailer, but still sad) until they die.
4. Number of children who get thyroid cancer caused by radioactive contamination that would not have otherwise -- even though Japan has arguably the best health care system in the world, and virtually all of these kids will live. Still sucks to have cancer and surgery when you're 8.
5. Incidental casualties (including cleanup workers). The actual local Fukushima plant boss became something of a hero after telling Tokyo (as in Tokyo Electric Power Company) to fuck off and calling his own shots during the worst of it. He died of cancer[1] last year, and also had a brain hemorrhage last year, ostensibly none of which was related. But there were a lot of young workers that went in there and like, did manual labor. They might be alive, but a lot of them aren't all gonna be fine.
6. Degradation of the best food on earth. I read in a Seattle newspaper (I'm pretty sure) that effectively all tuna now commercially caught have higher levels of cesium than before Fukushima. First the mercury, now this? NO FUCK YUO!!
And here in Japan it's like spinach, potatoes, meat, fish... they can only test like 0.1% of it (which is bullshit but that is another post).
7. And, since I am me, my personal standard of how fucked it was accrues bonus points for: each of the 17 times I was forced to choose between not bathing or bathing in cesium water (we did Perrier sponge baths at first but then bottled water became too scarce to use other than for drinking), the 1 time my local supermarket (high-end rich-people supermarket btw) had to hand me a letter apologizing for selling me beef with illegally high cesium levels, and the 50 hours I spent roaming Tokyo in search of clean bottled water in the aftermath.
I just can't see any reality where Fukushima isn't worse than New Horizon, on balance. Not that New Horizon wasn't bad. It just wasn't one of the worst disasters since I have been alive, where Fukushima was.
[1]: ht NO tp NO NO SORRY ://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/09/fukushima-nuclear-disaster-masao-yoshida-dead-cancer_n_3568293.html
At least that accidental huffington link explains why my computer had been audibly churning out all sorts of sad (but unrelated) human interest stories while I typed that post....
I can't say I'm a Lewis Page fan, but his coverage on the Register [1] added an interesting insight which was that contamination in the water was resulting in primarily beta radiation, not gamma radiation. I know the folks who are reporting this, the "World Nuclear Industry Status Report" [2] are not exactly unbiased. Read through other reports they have on their web site and they don't seem to be coming at the debate from a particularly balanced perspective.
In general though I find it hard to read coverage of nuclear power, gun control, and civil liberties these days given the very strident positions. It feels to me like walking in a room of people screaming at each other.
The part that wasn't explained very well in these articles is the nature of the threat from water leaking into the ocean. I would think, perhaps naively, that once it entered the ocean, it would dissipate and be relatively harmless. It would also be a relatively benign place to contaminate the groundwater. The groundwater would be too salty to drink, anyway, and it would flow directly into the ocean.
Anyone wishing to become more familiar with the murky process which led to the proliferation of the unsafe Boiling Water Reactors such as Fukushima should watch Adam Curtis' film A is for Atom, which details how the US government and General Electric conspired to ignore the warnings from the Atomic Energy Commission about the designs.
Those wary of Curtis and his psychedelic editing tricks should still give it a go - this one is from 1992, before he got so into Boards of Canada and flash cuts.
It's really sad and frightening for me to see such hysteria in the media and even in the comments here. I want to address all of it, but it's not possible even to make a dent. But I can offer the following numbers:
Fukushima release to groundwater
TEPCO estimate, August 2013
0.024 PBq (< 5g Sr-90) in 300 m^3 water
Fukushima releases to the sea
TEPCO estimate, May 2012
11 PBq I-131
3.5 PBq Cs-134
3.6 PBq Cs-137
Fukushima releases to air
TEPCO estimate, May 2012
500 PBq I-131
10 PBq Cs-137
10 PBq Cs-134
NISA estimate, June 2011
160 PBq I-131
15 PBq Cs-137
Chernobyl releases to air
Wikipedia, retrieved Aug 2012
1760 PBq I-131
85 PBq Cs-137
You're quoting a bunch of year or more old stats... there's been a flurry of recent news coverage because recent measurements have either exceeded past limits, or past measurements are now considered to have been underestimates, with respect to ocean release.
>Reports from Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), operator of the disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, say that measurements of radioactive tritium in seawater – seeping out of the nuclear complex via groundwater into the sea – show levels at 4700 becquerels per liter, the highest tritium level in the measurement history. The highest tritium levels have come in the past 15 days, the same reports show.
It is very very strange to be seeing such Tritium levels this late, it dilutes so quickly. It's so strange it's to even figure out probably causes.
No, I'm not missing recent events. Year-old stats are still valid because almost all the release occurred during the accident sequence in 2011.
I'll drink the 4700 Bq/L tritium water too. That level doesn't even exceed the WHO limit for drinking water (10,000) let alone the Finnish one (30,000) or Australian one (76,103). The 4.7kBq measurement was made in the quay in front of the plant, not the open sea. Rising tritium levels there may be a result of leaks of cesium-stripped water from the onsite treatment system, or simply natural variation in groundwater drainage from the site.
I don't want to get personal, but the way your post is written as if it comes from a place of knowledge, is a worthwhile example of a larger phenomenon.
Honestly, this is just business as usual for Japanese govt/bureaucracy here. The only difference is that it's the first time in a while that its bullshittery has been thrust onto the international stage.
If you're living in Japan or are any how strongly affiliated with it, you'd have to be a moron or just hopelessly incurably optimistic to believe anything the government or these pseudo governmental organizations say about anything remotely controversial. I've never trusted any statements or numbers issued by any Japanese entity since day 1. Since I can't trust anything, I just largely stay out of the country. Of course, its waste waters are being dumped into the ocean all the time so I'm getting owned anyways across the ocean.
Although it's possible this is really bad, I'm surprised by the lack of skepticism in this discussion so far. Mycle Snyder is described as an "independent consultant," with no mention of scientific or engineering credentials. There are quite a few people who make a living as consultants by exaggerating nuclear dangers.
The article also didn't give any numbers at all. How much radioactivity are we talking about here? Talking about "tonnes of radioactive water" is meaningless.
Presumably someone has measured actual radioactivity levels in the nearby ocean. Where are those numbers?
The article also didn't give any numbers at all. How much radioactivity are we talking about here? Talking about "tonnes of radioactive water" is meaningless.
80 MBq/L * 300,000 L = 24 TBq
Investigations showed that the level of water in the tank was about 3 metres lower than expected, indicating that some 300 cubic metres had escaped.
Tepco told WNN that the leaked water had already passed through the first 'SARRY' stage of decontamination, which had removed most of the radioactive caesium. It was yet to pass through the 'ALPS' treatment that would remove strontium and other beta-emitting radionuclides. As such its radioactivity is considered medium-to-low at 80,000 becquerels per cubic centimetre. Dose rates measured for gamma and beta radiation were high at over 100 milliSieverts per hour, while the dose rate for gamma only was low at just 1.5 milliSieverts per hour. Tepco did not specify if these were dose rates at the water surface or, more likely, a standard 1 metre above the ground.
Nearly every Fukushima mega-scare story I've encountered seems to go back to Arnie Gunderson, who is a professional anti-nuclear consultant.
At the same time, I see a near information blackout from other authorities. There just doesn't seem to be much good information on this one way or the other.
Radiation is very easy to detect. If there's a serious leak, people outside Japan could see it. Where is this data?
I take some reassurance that the anti-nuclear guys say we're fucked and pro-nuclear guys say nuclear is still the safest. That means the truth is probably somewhere in the middle ;-)
Sorry if I downvoted sarcasm. Unless you meant "middle" literally as in anything exactly as written by the most extreme of either side, this is a bad way to reason about things.
It's the kind of thinking that lets people say "well the anti-vaccine people are pretty strong about their views, but doctors disagree; it's probably somewhere in the middle" and slide about while being incorrect.
Argument to moderation (Latin: argumentum ad temperantiam; also known as [argument from] middle ground, false compromise, gray fallacy and the golden mean fallacy) is an informal fallacy which asserts that the truth can be found as a compromise between two opposite positions. This fallacy's opposite is the false dilemma.
Well contrary to what anti-nuclear supporters say, we know from a fact that in terms of death ratio per MWatts produced, Nuclear energy is certainly one of the safest ways to produce energy out there. It's not because there is one bad recent incident that it puts a sudden question mark on the whole technology.
I don't know why Japan can get away with this for so long. I remember when the Chernobyl disaster happened, Soviet Union was shamed to death by all western media for years. I had high respect for the Russians for their great efforts to contain the damage. A great many of red army soldiers died when building a concrete substrate underneath the ruined reactor, which prevented the underground water from being contaminated by radioactive pollution. In contrast, the Japan government hasn't been capable to do this for the past two years, which is apparently irresponsible and shockingly incompetent.
This might be, but at the same time the problem is not resolved and contained as it was in Chernobyl.
"We have three 100-ton melted fuel blobs underground, but where exactly they are located, no one knows. Whatever 'barriers' TEPCO has put in place so far have failed. Efforts to decontaminate radioactive water have failed. Robots have failed. Camera equipment and temperature gauges...failed. Decontamination of surrounding cities has failed. "
[..]
"If and when the corium reaches the Tokyo aquifer, serious and expedient discussions will have to take place about evacuating 40 million people"
Considering these future threats have not been resolved in any way I must say I respect for Soviet Unions reaction in Chernobyl case.
3800 miles and the next country is ... USA (Hawaii). However, both winds and water currents tend to go north of Hawaii, so it is more like 5200 miles on the great circle to California.
Why is the japanese government letting TEPCO deal with the disaster on their own? Why is the rest of the world letting Japan deal with the disaster on it's own? Contaminating the Pacific Ocean constantly with radioactive water surely affects a lot of other states.
This is something experts (TEPCO is obviously not in this position) should handle.
The bill for handling the disaster could then be presented at a later time to TEPCO and Japan.
The relationship between Japanese governments and corporations is much more incestuous than their Western counterparts'.
In any case, I don't think Tepco is completely alone in the cleanup effort, otherwise you wouldn't have people like Schneider talking about it. In fact, the irritation here comes from the fact that Fukushima continues to be a clusterfuck and everybody knows it... except TEPCO's PR people, who keep interpreting their best Chemical Ali impersonations.
Ahh, the early '00s, when black was black and white was white, GWB bad / Obama good, Powell doing stand-up at the UN, Darth Cheney ruling with an iron fist over the applauding masses... There's a reason I forgot most of that.
another bbc article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23764382
From that I think this is a one off discovery of 300 tonnes of highly radioactive water leaking, and in general 300 tonnes of 'not as radioactive' per day leak from the radioactive buildings.
I remember reading an article around the time of the Fukushima leak where a Chernobyl clean up crew survivor was interviewed. One of the key points was to get out as quickly as possible, that it'll be much worse than the government/industry initially says it is. I made a mental note to see if that ended up being true - looks like it unfortunately may be.
Have we gotten to the point where the Fukushima disaster has caused as many deaths as an equivalent megawattage of coal powerplants operating over Fukushima's lifetime would have?
Ok, so the lifetime output of the plant is 188 GW-years. Most estimates for the expected cancer deaths due to radiation are around 120. The evacuation itself caused 46 deaths due to disruption in medical care and suicide.
That means that Fukushima had .88 deaths per GWyr. That's 1/3 the death rate of coal according to an EU study, but twice the death rate of coal according to another study that looked at a different set of countries. Which I guess makes sense, most coal related deaths are going to be due to mining safety and particulate emissions which rich countries can do a lot to combat by investing in technology for safer money and scrubbing coal emissions.
So depending on the accuracy of the estimates - which may be drastically low, but also should be spread amongst the plants currently running without incident and their likelihood to continue that way - nuclear could end up being far more damaging to human health than coal for an equivalent amount of energy.
Well, the .88 deaths per GWyr is just for Fukushima. If you're talking about all nuclear power you have a lot of reactors that didn't have any problems but also Chernobyl, which was really very bad. So the global number is actually .1 for nuclear in general, historically. In the long run I expect both nuclear and coal to get safer.
I would say that in general we shouldn't be blind to the fact that nuclear power has serious problems, but we should also be aware that coal and oil have even more serious problems. In the long run we ought to be thinking of ways we can get by on renewable energy.
I guess this does not include all the radiation that we are still going to have, for decades and possible bigger damages yet to come: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6232104
Why are nuclear facilities frequently built near oceans and rivers? Is it due to the easy-access to water for cooling purposes? I've seen it in many places, and it just seems short-sighted in light of the potential to spread contamination when something goes wrong.
And the one that are not closed to the sea, are closed to rivers, and so are also at risk of being flooded. Another risk is that after severe heat waves, the river's water can become to "hot" to efficiently cool the reactor... Not to mention severe drought where the river level can become too low... All in all, plenty of different ways to fail.
They on purpose built them near the ocean, so they can just pump water inside it, and then throw back the hot water in the ocean, yet the heat is so big that it still heats up by half a degree one square kilometer of ocean or something like that.
I doubt it is feasible with a man-made pool of water.
But at least, they don't repeat fukushima stupidity of leaving the fuel rods on the ceiling (here the fuel rods are moved to a special building in a hill nearby).
The Shearon Harris reactor in North Carolina has a man-made lake for it's cooling. The water in there is slightly warmer than ambient temperatures. I believe one of the reasons not to add any additional reactors (when the NRC made additional licenses available a few years ago) was because they'd have to significantly increase the water acreage and the utility didn't have the land for it.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.
- Sigmund Freud
A rule of thumb I use for dealing with pronouncements from the government: If it's bad news, it's actually twice as bad as they say it is. If it's good news, it's actually half as good as they said. Thus far, it's proven reasonably accurate.
The worst part is that everyone wants to present their situation as being in control and not admitting that control over the situation was lost when the floods initially happened. If Fukushima was left to political entities to handle it, we'll end up with radioactive materials in everything all around the globe. Considering that today we eat food grown all over the plant, the worst part is the amount of radiation that will slip into our food supply.
Can someone translate this to plain English? What is the worse case scenario, in terms of damage to the environment and people? What kind of radius will the effects be contained to - is it just the coast of Japan or much further out?
That's true, but these containment tanks are right next to the ocean. So pretty much everything that leaks is going into the ocean.
And they aren't going to be gone by the time the next tsunami hits, so I think it is roughly (and with their level of ineptitude and deceit, roughly is as good as we are gonna get) reasonable to think that it's all (300,000 tons of radioactive water and counting) going into the Pacific at some point...
I deleted it because I forgot the water leaking out, but here's the original comment because it might be interesting.
"If I've understood everything correctly, it can't be as bad as the Chernobyl disaster. The only reason to why the radioactive material spread so far during the Chernobyl disaster was because the reactor core consisted of graphite, the graphite caught fire, and the dangerous material rose to the sky."
@jjsz The text is the same. What happened was that I deleted the comment before I saw that someone replied to it, and then it looked stupid with a good reply to a deleted comment.
Completely changing the parent comment like that and making this comment on a child doesn't make sense to me. You should have added another parent comment, or added an "edit: __" in the original comment.
Here is an interesting video describing a model of the spread of radiation from the Fukushima plant over the next 10 years. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it's an interesting watch nonetheless (and under 3 minutes):
Lest the logarithmic scale confuse anyone, the concentrations over most of the ocean are tiny. The scale has a 5 order-of-magnitude range.
As a reference point, Cs-137 background from atmospheric testing is a median 3 Bq/m^3 [1] in the Pacific. (Total weapons fallout was 25 MCi = 925 PBq of Cs-137 [2], about 30x Fukushima's 36 PBq [3]). Both are dwarfed by natural radioactivity, which includes 11 kBq/m^3 of K-40 [4].
I think meaningless is a little strong. We talk about CO2 emissions, even though the air contains CO2. My understanding would be more radioactive than ambient radiation, or something along those lines.
I do agree that seeing some actual numbers would be helpful (eg: types and amount (estimated) of isotopes).
The total increase in CO2 levels over the last couple hundred years is about 30%, from 280 PPM to around 400 PPM.
By contrast, the total increase in the ocean's radioactivity from Fukushima is about 0.000002%, give or take a zero. While "trillions of Bq" sounds bad, and probably isn't good, the oceans contain something like 14,000 exaBq worth of Potassium-40 alone.
The problem with radioactive releases is more about concentrating it. There's sort of an anti-goldilocks situation. If a radioactive release doesn't spread very well at all, that's kind of OK. The radioactivity at the point of release is extremely dangerous, but hey, it is well contained and you can clean it up. If the radioactivity spreads extremely well, that's kind of OK too. It freaks people out, but realistically if you dilute radioactive materials enough they stop being dangerous. You're pissing in the ocean.
But if the radioactive material spreads JUST RIGHT, you can contaminate too large of an area to clean up while still leaving the radiation levels high enough to be dangerous.
Of course it would be based on concentrations - but no one is announcing what that is, nor do they seem to really be able to get a clear idea of it - because it's not contained and therefore not accurately measurable.
I remember back when the earthquake hit we were in the engineering lab at university and we were gathered around one of the workstations watching YouTube video's of the even half way around the world. We were shocked but we were fairly confident that their government had a handle on the situation. They are an earthquake prone country after all, they surely planned for this. My roommate was a transfer studying English and had a few friends from South Korea and Japan. They were going to a pub and I came along for the ride. I will never forget that night.
1. One of his friends got a phone call telling him his best friend was missing. He left and I never saw the guy again, I don't know what happened to his friend. This made the situation really feel real to me. Not just something just happening on TV.
2. While talking to a Japanese guy there (who I knew well and had a history of being BRUTALLY honest about his own country) said straight up: "This is worse than the government is admitting". Even before problems with Fukushima were announced he said this. I was dumbstruck by how the people could truly not believe their own government in any of the slightest and how despite this the Government perpetually wants to pretend everything is fine to keep the populous calm. As time has gone on I only further believe him on this fact. And I believe that it is still worse than they are currently admitting.
can someone explain why they are accumulating so much extra water? surely they can just reuse the already contaminated water in the tanks? obviously there's good reason, just curious why.
As a person who was in japan during the touhoku earthquake, and I'd like to point out that most of the japanese people probably have no idea what is happening in regards to this. If it's on the news, they are probably airing it BECAUSE of the global shitstorm tha has emerged. The only news I trusted while I was there was the BBC (Japanese news told you nothing, American news were sensationalizing every thing, slow at best, wrong at worst)
This "story" is simply a press release from Mycle Scneider, who has a clear and consistent record as being anti-nuclear power and a probable agenda to elevate concern about it. I'd like to see a real "independent" report which cites multiple views and has real measurements, not meaningless twaddle like "tons of radioactive water."
This is very bad news for the nuclear industry although I think the threat to the global environment is overblown.
For instance, they speak as if going into the ocean was the worst place the leakage could go. But face it, the ocean is a huge place and spread out that thin, it's an infinitesimal part of the natural background radiation.
Sure, radiation puts stress on life forms, but so does SO2, CO2, POPs and all the other pollution we create and in the big picture Fukushima has far less impact than, say, rice farming, has in Japan.
I was in Tokyo recently and had a chance to speak to some friends about this. Many of false claims and lack of transparency by the Japanese government are driven by the fact that affected areas around Fukushima are heavy tourist areas.
Combined with lack of growth in exports, over which their economy is already expected to be heading into a crisis in the next few years, the impact of a long-term reduction in tourism has potentially serious national implications.
I can't imagine why anyone is surprised by this. The people in the know will never tell us the true depth of the problems with the economy right now, the floor of the gulf is absolutely destroyed from being covered in oil, etc. A conspiracy theorist sized dose of cynicism when reading the news is about the only way to get any sort of reality out of it.
"They are worried about the enormous quantities of water, used to cool the reactor cores, which are now being stored on site.
Some 1,000 tanks have been built to hold the water. But these are believed to be at around 85% of their capacity and every day an extra 400 tonnes of water are being added."
Probably they are still cooling down the reactors, as least somewhat. The effect is called "decay heat" and does take quite some time to completely dissipate for reactors of that scale.
However there is also a lot of groundwater leaking into the basement/reactor complex apparently, which then needs to be pumped back out.
it's about time the three countries closest to Japan - Korea, China, and Russia, all of whom have great power and relation(trade and diplomatic) with Japan, to respond. I mean, they've already done but it's time to make the pressure more concrete... economic sanction, albeit partial?
Honestly, internet snarkiness and 2 minute rages aside, I wonder what this will mean for us in the future. I wonder how US crops, the Australia climate, and Chinese drinking water quality will be affected. Is this so bad that Japan has essentially damned the entire region? Or are we going to see a mass die-off of fish around the world? It's just a really scary situation, and totally not cool.
Not to be rude but I think you're highly overestimating the effects this could have globally. The ocean is really big, and it's not like radioactivity is contagious. As for the local effects, who knows...
EDIT: by who knows, I just mean I'm not aware of the scale, I could imagine it getting pretty bad. It's just that with all the sensationalism and non comprehension of basic statistics in some articles, I feel pretty misinformed on the subject.
I would expect something between slightly higher levels of radiation in fish (which might sum up if you eat it and might "surprisingly" lead to cancer) and an apocalyptic disaster that affects every creature on earth if TEPCO fucks up anything with the large number of fuel rods, which are still stored at Fukushima.
Um, let's try to keep things in perspective, please. This is very bad for the people that are near the plant, no question. But in global terms, the total amount of contaminated water that could potentially leak is miniscule. The Pacific Ocean is really, really big.
The article says that 400 metric tons of contaminated water are being added every day. Let's say that leakage rate goes on for 5 years. That's about a million metric tons of contaminated water.
The volume of the Pacific Ocean is about 660 million cubic kilometers. One cubic kilometer of water weighs about a billion metric tons; so the a million metric tons of radioactive water is one 660 billionth of the volume of the Pacific Ocean.
Now let's talk about the fuel rods. An accident involving those could potentially have effects similar to Chernobyl in terms of spreading radiation; but since there are four reactors at risk at Fukushima, we would expect the global effects to be about four times the global effect of Chernobyl. While the global effects of Chernobyl were certainly measurable, they hardly amounted to "an apocalyptic disaster", or even one fourth of one.
Also the Soviets reacted pretty fast in comparison to TEPCO and made sure, that a lot of the material did not escape, while TEPCO doesn't seem to be very competent in this regard...
It looks like the total right now is about 10 times Chernobyl, but if TEPCO keeps transferring more spent fuel to the storage pools, it could go up to 24 times Chernobyl (the total spent fuel inventory).
I would still argue that 24 times Chernobyl is nowhere near "apocalyptic" on a global scale. But you're right, it's good to work with the correct numbers.
the Soviets reacted pretty fast in comparison to TEPCO and made sure, that a lot of the material did not escape
Once they had a chance to react, yes. But a lot of the radioactive material inside the Chernobyl reactor was released with the combined hydrogen and graphite explosion which happened very early in the sequence of events, before anything could be contained. After that explosion, as I understand it, there wasn't a lot left to contain. The only way that release could have been prevented would have been if the Soviets had had the sense to build a secondary containment structure around the reactor, which they didn't.
Right, but isn't radioactive water like cordial, you only need a small amount to change a much larger body of water?
Ton for ton, I can see your point of how it's only a drop in the ocean, but if that drop is highly radioactive and spreads in the currents, wouldn't that be enough to cause serious damage?
isn't radioactive water like cordial, you only need a small amount to change a much larger body of water?
I'm not sure what you mean here. Radioactive water is just water with some radioactive atoms dissolved in it. The total number of radioactive atoms in the million tons of radioactive water is fixed; they don't multiply. (In fact the number gradually decreases as the radioactive atoms decay.)
if that drop is highly radioactive and spreads in the currents, wouldn't that be enough to cause serious damage?
It will get diluted as it spreads; that was my point. The waters off the coast where Fukushima is are certainly not safe to fish in right now; but that's because the radioactivity is concentrated in a much smaller volume of water.
If by "radioactive" you mean "ever emits radiation" then yes, a small amount of radioactive water can dilute into a large volume of still-radioactive water.
By if you use that definition you yourself would be considered "radioactive" as you are always walking around carrying quite a few radioactive isotopes, including Carbon-14 (as made famous by "carbon dating" from geology) and Potassium-40.
As pdonis notes, radioactive contaminants dilute just as well as any other contaminant in water. Assuming it more-or-less evenly mixes within the Pacific Ocean, you could essentially dump all of Fukushima into that ocean and not see large changes in overall ocean radioactivity.
It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the industry are towards minimizing costs / maximizing profits. This is fine for some other industries, but it seems to fail for areas where the impact of mismanagement is much more severe than a bankruptcy.
We have to find a way to make those critical industries transparent and honest so that citizens can trust them again.